Some stories get lost, and new stories arrive.

  

I touched on the way colonial scholars, anthropologists and ethnologists corrupted the stories they heard and the rituals they observed, whether deliberately to make the indigenous communities look primitive and superstitious, or instinctively because their only point of reference for spiritual matters was a Christian one. However, yesterday I encountered the thread above, relating to the bastardization of stories that comprise what we know of Norse mythology. This is a regular historical occurrence, and it actually reminds me of when I was in primary school back in the early 1980s. At that time I was going to a private Christian school, and I remember a geography lesson about the subcontinent of India. We were basically told that the people of India were backward and uncivilized because they generally followed either Islam or Hinduism, rather than Christianity... yes, it was pretty racist and ethnocentric (which is basically prejudicing someone based on their culture rather than their genetics). We were told that at least they weren't as bad as the Africans with their tribal religions and shamanism, or the Chinese and their Buddhism, which was now eve worse with their rejection of religion. On similar lines we were told that it was only the presence of the English military in India for centuries, and the regular presence of missionaries that had kept the Indians from completely falling behind the rest of the world.

Killing stories kills cultures, spreading lies and indoctrinating new generations contributes to the killing of stories. That all in the background of Walkabout. 

The spirits of the Walkabout setting are anchored to reality through the stories told about them. So they've got a few reasons to be upset about the mortals in the world. They want a restoration or reformation of the mortal communities that once acted as both custodians of the land and the keepers of the sacred stories. They also consider the stories of the other beings who have come to their lands, some of those stories have become overbalancing in the world and have disrupted the power equilibrium in the world. 

On the other hand, while I was doing my university degree in cultural analysis and Indigenous studies, I found that there are a number of indigenous stories that have changed in recent generations. As an example, there are new animal narratives which incorporate cats, foxes, and other introduced feral species (and their associative traits from various immigrant folklore). Human narratives tell of the historical events that have occurred since colonialism, sometimes orally telling the established historical events, sometimes veiling the events with false names or applying morality lessons into the story. Then there are the stories which are like the transformation of Loki into a "devil-figure", they seem to have fused Christian dogma to Australian Indigenous tropes, to create a hybrid narrative.

Belief and stories are powerful things in this setting. I looked at this when I first considered the idea of the spirits, back in 2012, before I'd done my university study and formally investigated Indigenous lore. Again I looked at this a bit in one of the previous posts from 2018, but that was before I interacted with a range of indigenous communities and mostly had theoretical university study and the lore of a single group of elders to work with. Now there's more information to work with, it hasn't really helped. There is no monolithic notion of spiritualism, and much of what remains is corrupted at varying levels from what it may once have been. Most Aboriginal Australians are as Christian (or as influenced by Christianity) as most non-Indigenous Australians. I'm never going to develop a spirituality for this game that everyone is agrees matches "true" indigenous spirituality, but the best I can do is to be respectful of the various communities and their associated lore.